Summoned to Tourney by Mercedes Lackey; Ellen Guon Page A

tried to calm herself, to concentrate, imagining that long-haired too-handsome face, imagining him seated on the plaza bench, probably already wondering why it was taking her so long to get two cups of coffee and Perrier…
    Eric, hear me. Eric, I’m in trouble, I don’t know what’s going on, but I need your help, you and Kory. Come on, Eric, listen to me…
    “Son of a bitch!” The pistol cracked against the side of her face. Everything went white for a moment, and she tasted blood. “You’re going to sit there and do nothing and think nothing, girl,” the man warned her. “Or I’ll kill you.”
    “Bastard,” she muttered, covering her face with her hands, trying not to tremble too much. The tears were harder to fight, but somehow she managed to keep from crying or shaking too much by staring down at her clenched fists in her lap, only occasionally reaching up to wipe away the blood from her mouth.
     
    It was a small room, bare concrete walls painted white, at the end of a series of concrete corridors that led out from the silent underground parking garage. The dark-haired man in front of her was also white, wearing some kind of white laboratory coat. He frowned at her when he saw the blood on her face, and gestured for her to sit down in one of the two wooden chairs in the room. He took the other chair, sitting in front of the plain table with the laptop computer set up upon it. The blond man and his driver took up positions next to the door.
    Her jaw still ached, but the pain was nothing as hot as the fury in her brain. I don’t know what in the hell is going on here, but I’m going to kill someone , she thought. “So, schmuck, why did you bring me here?”
    He smiled. “Call this a recruitment drive. We have a form here that you can sign, which’ll allow us to treat you as one of the team, defining your legal rights in this situation.”
    She hardly believed she had heard him say that. “Team of what? Psychopaths? No thanks, slimeball.”
    “Or we can work out some other arrangement,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “But it would be much easier for us if you volunteered. Much easier for you, too.”
    “Or there’s a third option:you can let me go, and maybe I won’t send the cops and the mother of all lawsuits against you, mister,” Beth said angrily.
    “You won’t file a lawsuit against us,” The man gave her a cold, patronizing smile. “You don’t even know where you are, or who I am. If we toss you back out on the street, all you’ll be able to do is spin some ridiculous story about being kidnapped by government officials. And no one will believe you, of course.”
    “So you’re a government agency?” Christ, none of this is making any sense!
    “What is your name?” he asked, glancing down at the laptop computer on the table in front of him.
    “Up yours,” she replied tightly.
    He shook his head. “Not a very original answer. So, tell me about yourself. What are you afraid of?”
    Bastards like you. What kind of place is this, anyhow? She didn’t bother to answer his question, studying the blank white concrete walls. It looked too solid to be an office building. She remembered the thin plaster walls of the television studio, and how you could hear people yelling through them at every hour of the day and night. This was more like a bunker than an office building… who built in concrete slabs, anyhow?
    “What are you afraid of?” he repeated.
    Police, handcuffs, the blood staining the walls of Phil’s house like a surrealist painting…run away, before the Feds catch you and lock you up forever in a dark, airless cell… “You know,” she said in a conversational voice, “I bet I could break your nose before your goons could stop me. That would be an interesting experiment, wouldn’t it?”
    The man made a note on his computer, then looked up at the blond man. “Bill, please turn off that fan by the door. Yes, thank you.”
    She glanced at the fan, then at him.